Reflections on a Christmas Pageant - December 16

Kids bring us together. The tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, leaves us all strongly aware of this. Yesterday our congregation joined with folks around the globe, believers and non-believers alike, in praying for comfort and peace, an end to such violence, for the families in Newtown.

I feel almost a duty to write about the horror of school shootings, the absolute horror of a shooting in an elementary school. This violence, with an altogether new terror and repulsion, tugs at a deep place in my heart. I remember walking my high school hallways in the days after Columbine. I cannot fully tell my own story without recounting how the televised news of that violence changed me.

But these stories and laments were in part displaced yesterday by the implacable church calendar: The Sunday School Christmas pageant was scheduled for yesterday morning. We had given the hour of our worship service to the kids to tell us the good news story of Jesus' birth.

Part of me sees a difficult irony in this. Kids sharing good news in the midst of so much tragic news about children. But hope often sounds difficult and ironic in our ears (no one foregrounds the interplay of hope and irony better than John the Evangelist). 

The kids of our congregation toddled in their homemade shepherd's costumes, some with stuffed lambs clutched in one hand. Mary and Joseph stood silent and wide-eyed before their grandparents and parents in the pews, uttering a barely audible "Oh, okay" when the angel delivered news of Jesus' impending birth. King (or, in our case, Queen) Herod gave directions to magi who were not quite on stage yet. 

In short, their Christmas program had all the dear details, the amateur earnestness, that fill adults' hearts with comfort and joy during this season. When we sang our closing hymn, "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus," I was certain those in the pews had heard good news as surely as if the angel Gabriel himself had appeared in our midst. Parents beamed, directors and stagehands laughed with relief, children jumped up and down in excitement as they received their Christmas treat bags from their Sunday School teachers.

I stood back and smiled. The kids had brought good news to us: "A savior is born to bring peace to all people."

But, Oh, that we lived in that peace now. Through Advent we've sang a simple song, "Come, Lord, and Bring Hope." Each verse substitutes a new word for hope: peace, joy, love, life. In some ways, our God has already answered our congregational prayer: Jesus has come, Jesus was born, Jesus lived and loved, healed and taught, Jesus submitted to death, Jesus has even risen once more to life! Like the more traditional Advent carol, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," our songs in this season are in no small part a re-enactment, a remembering of longings our God has already filled.

But as I watched the kids' program from the sound booth, I had the dark realization that we do not have more than twenty kids in our Sunday School program. Most of the kids are elementary-aged. Peace is still far from us. So are hope, joy, love, and life.

I gave my closing thoughts to the congregation after the program. Throughout the weeks and even months leading up to Advent, I've felt strong conviction that this worship service was one in which to be forthrightly evangelistic. I prepared my reflection early in the week, before any of us would or could have imagined such tragedy would occur so near to us. (You can read my thoughts posted below, if you'd like.)

I delivered my closing message as I'd prepared it, unsure how to speak on tragedy without robbing the kids of their joyous presentation. But I'm not confident that I made the right decision. Perhaps, I think, I should have spoken more directly to the tragic irony of proclaiming hope and peace in violent times. I'd value your input. 

Let us pray and act for peace.

(You can read the full text of what I said after the jump . . .)

October 21 - Snippet from Sunday - Hold Your Tongue

It matters to me that we control our tongues. It matters to me because our tongues should be praising God. Our mouths should be testifying to the great things God has done to save us, not just when we share that good news with another person, not just when we’re gathered in this meetinghouse on a Sunday morning, but every time we open our mouths. The character of our speech--its kindness and gentleness, its love--witnesses to our loving Lord Jesus who set us free.

But when we let our mouths off their leashes and let the world know what we really think of it, we end up cursing, insulting, abusing the very people Jesus loves and came to save. In those moments, we’re not praising our God and king. No, we’re testifying instead to the ongoing rule of everything in the world that opposes God. We’re saying that death, not life, is king. We’re proclaiming that, no, there isn’t enough to go around, so we better make clear what’s our due. We’re witnessing that God is not our king and defender--no, we have to defend ourselves with our words.

Friends, this shouldn’t be! We are the community that Jesus has saved! Our words should pour refreshing, living water into the lives of those we’re talking with. Jesus’ kindness and compassion should echo in the way we speak to one another. Salt water and fresh water can’t flow from the same spring without all the water becoming salty; in the same way, we can’t try to mix destructive, death-dealing speech in with our words without polluting all our witness. James is calling for us to consistently show love in how we use our words, to live up to the image of God we see in Jesus.

(Check out the whole sermon after the jump. . .)

Moving to Nunavut

At certain times of year, I find myself fixated with maps. I'll spend hours examining the backroads and no-name towns in parts of the country I've never been to, or I'll plot out an elaborate route on Canadian highways to get from here in Chicago to the mountains in Montana.

One night, I'm not sure how many months ago, I was paging through a road atlas when I discovered a territory I'd never before noticed: Nunavut.

May 24 - There Are No Detours in Mission

Living Water Community Church - May 24
Acts 28 - “There are No Detours in Mission”

Seven months ago, Cindy and I left Living Water to go start a new church community in the suburb of Bolingbrook. We talked it over with a lot of people here at the church, we prayed together, we even had a goodbye party for Cindy and me. We went out with the church’s blessing. . . . And now we’re back.

I think our story is a little like Paul’s story in Acts 28. So I’m going to spend a few minutes this morning telling my story, a little time talking about Paul’s story, and then we’ll spend some time praying together about how it relates to our stories--what God is asking of us as a church-community and what God is asking of each of us personally.

Oscar Romero - d. March 24, 1980

Today marks the 29th anniversary of the death Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador. He was assassinated while performing the mass because he named the ways in which the gospel demanded that his society and its government change.

I value Mark Van Steenwyk's reflection: 

Instead of venerating him, let us be more like him. And instead of lifting up as some sort of patron saint of peace and justice, may his lingering prophetic voice, which still echoes through the halls of time, encourage to lift our own voices as we follow Jesus in our place and time.

Follow the (different yet rather similar) links below links below to read more reflections on Romero.

Remembering Romero and Resisting Abstraction - Jesus Manifesot

Remembering Romero - Inhabitatio Dei

Remembering Monseñor Óscar Arnulfo Romero - kingdom praxis

Remembering Romero - flying.farther

March 15 - Our Mission

First Presbyterian Church of DuPage - The Five O’Clock
Mk 6.1-13, 30-32 & Ezek 2.1-5 - Our Mission

Jesus comes home to Nazareth. On the Sabbath, he goes to the synagogue and begins to teach the people that the time they’ve been waiting of is now here, that God’s about to set the world right, and that they must repent and begin to trust him if they are to be involved in the new world God is bringing. Jesus has preached this message all throughout the region of Galilee, and even briefly across the lake in the non-Jewish region of the Gerasenes. Now he’s brought it to the the town where he grew up, to Nazareth, where his mom and his brothers James, Joses, Judas and Simon live. He brings the message to the town where his sisters have married and are starting families of their own.

I don’t often get back to Montana, to Belgrade, the little town where I grew up. My parents still live in an old farmhouse a few miles north of town. I have a brother and a sister in college at Montana State and another little sister still in high school. When I go back to visit, however much I want things to be the same as they were when I was growing up, things are always a bit different. I’ve changed in my years away. I went to college in Ohio, got married, lived as a missionary in Eastern Europe, studied theology at a Catholic university here in Chicago, and now I’m part of a crazy little community that mets at five o’clock on Sunday nights. My family and high school friends are understanding; they realize that too much time away from the mountains will change a person. But when I start talking about my vision of what the church is called to be, of where God is calling us, of what it means to be a Jesus-follower, sometimes they squirm uncomfortably in their seat or they look bored or they nod and mutter something about “Josh, you have the strangest ideas, but we know you’ll grow out of them.”

That’s what Jesus experiences in Nazareth. “Where did you get these ideas?” they ask. “Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And aren’t his sisters all here with us?” And what does the text go on to say? He was not able to do a miracle there, except to lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed because of their unbelief.

These people are evidence that some seed falls alongside the path and Satan swoops down and steals it away before it has any time to sprout. these people--Jesus’ in-laws and neighbors, his brothers and childhood friends--they don’t hear Jesus’ message. We might expect them to be the most receptive. After all, this is the religious synagogue Jesus attended as he grew up. But these people already think they know Jesus. So they scoff at his message in disbelief, unable to recognize the new thing that God is offering to them.

It’s in this context, right after this faithless and heartbreaking response from his hometown, that Jesus calls his twelve closest followers to himself and sends them out on a mission.

As I’ve prepared for tonight, I’ve wrestled with why Jesus chooses to send out his followers two-by-two just now. Wouldn’t it have been better to send them out when they were all pumped up, like last week after he raised the dead girl back to life or right after he calmed the storm on the lake? Why do it now? Then there’s a second, bigger question I’ve struggled to answer: What does this mean for our community that meets here on Sunday nights?

We are a community that Jesus has sent out on a mission. In fact, it’s more or less the same mission he sends the twelve on. Even though I pray that our time together on Sunday evenings is transforming our lives--even though I hope that when you get into a disagreement with a coworker, your first response is not to go gossip about them to someone else but to respond in the kindness and seemingly senseless love of God’s kingdom; even though I hope that when you get the bad news that a close family member is seriously ill, your response is not to bury yourself in the distraction of television or the Internet or to stare blankly in despairing fatalism but that instead, even through your tears, you pray to the God who save us, who is already healing the world and making all things new in the resurrection life of Jesus--personal transformation is not the only purpose or even the main purpose of our community. Why do we get together on Sunday nights?

A Young Church? A New Community.

Some things make me happy. Like last Sunday night.

The church group I'm part of stakes its identity on the conviction that community--fellowship, koinonia--is a major part of Jesus' message about the new order of things God is bringing. Just like God frees us through Jesus' death and resurrection to be in his family (John's Gospel says to be "children of God"), so we're freed to be family to one another. This is something we're struggling to learn how to live, to move this from conviction to habit. I think some would call this "discipleship" or, maybe, "spiritual formation."

We've been trying out different ways to do this. We're plotting to begin home groups in the next months. We've already passed around sign up sheets for rotating dinners around each others dining room tables (or on each others living room floors). (If anyone still needs to sign up, email me.) Another way we've been training ourselves in the discipline of friendship is a common potluck after each service.

Last Sunday night, this looked like fifteen or so people, clustering around three or four tables, slurping bowls of white bean chili (a Cindy specialty), chomping garlic bread, and savoring some cake batter cookies (if you've never had these, your taste buds are missing an new world of delight). Even better than the food (which, let me repeat, was quite good), people were trading stories, getting to know one another. Some are old friends--some are old married couples. Some are quite new. Everyone was, perhaps unknowingly, showing what the new life Jesus promised looks like, how it listens and laughs, ask questions, passes the container of cookies. This makes me happy.

We started out calling our Sunday night gatherings "the Five O'Clock Service." I thought that was a generic enough, straight-forward enough. But after some reflection, some prayer, and a few conversations, we're changing the name. From this point forward, we'll be the Five O'Clock Community. I hope when we follow Jesus, it looks a lot more like sharing in a potluck than listening to a sermon.

Jan 25, 2009 - The Kingdom of God Is Near

First Presbyterian Church of DuPage - The Five O’Clock
Mk 1.14-34 - “The Kingdom of God Is Near”

Now after John was handed over, Jesus went into Galilee and proclaimed the good news of God. He said, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!”

Now we’re in it. We talked last week about how Mark was letting us in on the secret, laying it all out in front of us, explaining who Jesus really is. He showed us first in his title--The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God. He showed us in the way he described John the Baptizer. He showed us through what happened after Jesus was baptized--the sky splitting apart, the Holy Spirit anointing him, God declaring, “You are my beloved Son, in you I take great delight.” But now Jesus comes back from down South where John was preaching by the river, he comes back form forty days in the desert, now he comes back proclaiming the good news that the kingdom of God, the new world set right that God brings, is just now arriving--and we’re plunged into confusion. The light’s go out. We’re left with all sort of people--normal people, rich people, farmers and fishermen, beggars, prostitutes, and political power mongers--all debating and misunderstanding who Jesus is, what his message is about.

Last week I told you to hold on tightly to the clear, mountaintop glimpse of who Jesus is as we spend the next few months walking through the sometimes frantic, sometimes monotonous, sometimes lonely, sometimes harried, sometimes anonymous world where Mark tells the rest of hist story, the world that we live in.

“The time is fulfilled! The kingdom of God is just about to arrive!” Jesus announces. In fact, in a lot of ways it’s arriving right now, in Jesus, through what he does, what he says. But it’s not here all the way. We can even see that in our day. This world does not look like--does not feel like--the new world, the good world that God brings. And this is part of Mark’s and Jesus’ point. The new world cannot really begin until Jesus is handed over to the authorities, before he dies, before he is raised into the new life of God’s new world. The new world, God’s kingdom, is here and yet a lot of it is, even still, just about to arrive.
But what I’m saying here is too theological, too abstract. Jesus doesn’t come to meet us in our theology; we don’t live the new life of God’s world in our doctrinal statements. He meets us while we’re washing dishes after potluck, while we’re chasing down a rambunctious son or daughter, while we’re inputting number into a computer at work or trying to appease a cranky customer, while we’re having an awkward long distance phone conversation with a parent, when we crawl into bed and wish we weren’t quite so alone. God’s kingdom--the new world, God’s new life--is something that we need to find in our every day lives.

But what does it look like? We all know there are too many counterfeits out there! We tend to water it down to a “God is in all things,” to a hunt for the warm fuzzies or the silver lining. Or else we fixate on one part of it, turning “Love your neighbor as yourself” into a baptism for our failing attempts at world peace, or our unapologetic defense of our way of life. Sometimes we turn the promise of eternal life into a raspy-voice, finger-pointing tirade about hellfire and brimstone. But as much as I read the stories about Jesus in the New Testament, I never see him going around Galilee peddling tickets to heaven, his message was never about a washing machine in every home, a laptop for every child, or two cars in every garage. And he certainly never gave his support to the Roman government’s “peace”--their pax romana enforced by a military garrison in every major city, heavy taxes to house and feed their “peacekeepers,” and just enough entertainment--gladiators, festival days--to keep the poor too distracted to revolt. But if none of these are the new life Jesus brings, what is it? What does God’s kingdom look like?

Jubilee

this sunday i began my career as a jr. high sunday school co-leader. i slipped into the role unexpectedly when i was playing foursquare with some neighbor kids at our church’s vbs kick-off block party. the red ball had bounced into the gutter full of street-juice, so after i grabbed it i went to the gatorade cooler to wash the sewage stench off my hands with some ice water. that’s when our church’s christian ed director pulled me aside: “josh, i was just hoping to get a chance to talk to you…” turns out summertime is a break not just for school kids but also for the regular sunday school teachers. i was happy to get a chance to hang out with some of the coolest, if not a little adolescently awkward, people in the church.

but it’s a heavy responsibility. helping anyone follow Jesus is, but all the more so when the people are young and influence-able. but it’s not an accountability i share alone; i have a very cool and like-minded co-conspirator taking on this responsibility with me. i’ve been playing with how best to get the kids to buy-in to the group for the summer, despite all the seasonal distractions (vacations, nice weather, being twelve, etc.). whatever their finished, pithy form, i’ve settled on a few goals for what i’d like to see happen in the group: i want the kids to dig deeper into the spiritual side of following Jesus; i want them to explore their emerging, christian identities; i want them to talk with our church-community about what they’re learning; and i want them to live out what they’re learning in loving service and proclamation. basically, i want us together to become more like Jesus in how we think, feel, and act.

but this is far harder to accomplish in a forty-five minute class than on paper. take this week’s lesson for example: the assigned texts (for the whole church–we’re doing a churchwide curriculum to foster conversation around dinnertables; this summer’s curriculum is built around the theme “things that make for peace”) were leviticus 25.8-55 and luke 4.16-21, the laws instituting the jubilee year and Jesus’ proclamation of jubilee. after a quick walk to our local dunkin donuts (a great way to win the hearts of six pre-teens!), we sat down, me with my coffee, them with their donuts and cool-lattas and croissant, to explore the passage.